Is Nate Silver Funnier Than Steven Colbert?

I’ve always thought that the virtue, if you want to call it that, of baseball prospectus’s PECOTA was a marketing angle. By defining confidence intervals it inverts the projection process. The projection is assumed right, and it is the player’s peformance that deviates. I met Nate a few years ago at a dinner and I was surprised by how much I liked him. We rode to Brooklyn together on the subway afterward and, while I wasn’t surprised by how much he knew about baseball projection, I was impressed by how open he was to other ideas.

Nate’s new venture is a website tracking and adjusting public opinion polls about this upcoming election we’re having. It’s called fivethirtyeight.com and it’s full of interesting facts, opinions ideas, and though avowedly nonpartisan, they’ve got Obama with a 90 percent chance of winning the election. That sounds good to me.